When I came back to England in 1945, the end of the Second World War, I felt, after the years of living in some of India’s remotest places, I needed to go to London. “Come into the market place,” said my literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown but, “London!” said my father as if nobody lived in London. “If you go to London you are on your own.”
I still knew I must go; his and my mother’s very care and kindness was inhibiting and I needed to be, for a while at least, in the current of literary life.
It was not easy; I soon despaired of finding a flat or small house, everything was far beyond my means and I had almost decided to go back to Cornwall when I saw an advertisement in an estate agent’s window. I was attracted at once by the price, “Eleven hundred pounds for thirteen years leasehold.”
It was in a mews off Eaton Square, squeezed between two other houses, with only one sitting room, a miniature kitchen, one fair-sized bedroom – my daughters Jane’s and Paula’s I thought – a smaller one, mine, and a little telephone room off the stairs which would hold a bed for Simon, my small nephew whose parents were in India. There was also a resident mouse with which we made friends; it always came out when the telephone rang.
In front, the little house gave directly on to the cobbled yard; at the back it was against a wall, but it had a garage – “I’ll make that into a playroom one day.” It was possible – just.
The house was so small it needed little furniture; fortunately it had built-in cupboards and I had bought beds, some chintzes, and the upstairs carpeting from the former owner; for the rest we had nothing and, at once, I came up against a problem: the only furniture available on coupons was “utility,” hastily made furniture replacements for bombed or blasted houses, cheap and badly finished. The alternative seemed to be antiques. I found that prices of these were not exorbitant, perhaps because people were still so numbed by loss and by restrictions that they had not woken up to true values, indeed most antique shops were still shut. Here I evolved a small philosophy which has stood me in good stead, “If you haven’t the money to buy the quality you want, go without, don’t compromise.” I decided to buy what I could – better to sit on packing cases than squander precious money on utility.
Nobody approved of the house. “It’s rather bijou,” said Spencer, which meant he did not like it. To me it was bijou, a little jewel of a house: I adored it and had a rich wonderful time for a while but only a while. I began to find I had made a mistake, the busy whirl of London’s life was not for me and more seriously, “When are you going to do some writing?” asked Spencer. The book I had started lay untouched on my table. I was writing articles for Vogue, for the now defunct Time and Tide, encouraged by Lady Rhonda, not my real work. Then I realized with a shock I had not as much money as I had thought – I had forgotten about tax. Finally the time came when I had to tell myself miserably, “You have squandered, muddled, and wasted everything, everything from opportunity to money. Wasted.”
There I was wrong. After the war years of hard work, poverty, and loneliness in Kashmir I needed that space of gaiety, companionship, even luxury, and I have come to believe that nothing is ever wasted; out of mistakes, or through mistakes, something quite worthwhile can come, in my case the seed of another novel.
The mews was close to the square’s parklike garden where the railings had been taken away to be melted down for the war effort – every scrap of metal was precious – so that the children from the poorer streets used to come and play in the garden until they were chased away by angry residents. I spent every moment I could in the garden, listening and talking to the children, those little London sparrows.
There was, too, a bombed-out church; picking my way through the rubble, slabs of cracked marble, bits of pillar, I came across that strange phenomenon of bombed-out London, flowers, weed flowers of course, pushing their way and blossoming in the ruins. Perhaps it was this that gave An Episode of Sparrows its underlying theme; all my novels are stories but underlying each is a deeper theme, never said but there.
But what really planted the seed was when that summer I had my window boxes filled by a jobbing gardener; they were my only garden and looked fresh, as pretty as the house in that rather squalid mews. A few days later I had a call from two ladies who lived in the square. “Not a social call,” they told me because, did I know, that the earth in my window boxes had been stolen from the gardens in the square? It was the first time I knew that earth could be stolen. The elder of the two ladies, who wore a hat with blue feather wings, spoke those, to me, memorable words: “If you want earth you can buy it from the Army and Navy Stores, seven shillings and sixpence the carton.”
It took a long time to germinate, which is often the way with a book, and it was not until ten years later that I wrote the opening lines:
The garden committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square . . .
RUMER GODDEN, 1993